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Matt Stump
Gearing for an era of multiple transactions through interactive digital television, Mindport USA plans to showcase its integrated customer care and billing system,conditional access products and set-top reference designs in a "partners pavilion"at the Western Show this year.
The MIH Limited subsidiary has set its sights on what it believes will be an open U.S. interactive digital video market.
"Two emerging forces, digital cable technology and the media convergence, are the new drivers of the cable business," said Phil Braden, president/CEO of Mindport Inc. "Open standards will be adopted and the old duopoly of vendors will splinter."
Mindport owns 70% of recent high-flyer software firm OpenTV Inc. The company also has a conditional access system, Irdeto, and a customer care and billing systems, Integrated Business Systems. Its systems serve some six million cable, DBS and terrestrial TV customers worldwide.
Zenith Electronics Corp., OpenTV, Divicom Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. are working with Mindport in its partners pavilion to showcase digital interactive capabilities, including HDTV upconverter signal processing, Web-based e-commerce and customer care and billing.
Mindport will demonstrate real-time service level changes, allowing subscribers to change levels of cable service, smart card enabled pay-per-view billing for accessing video streamed content from the Internet and e-commerce applications. Mindport's conditional access technology allows operators to move beyond traditional pay television to IP scrambling technology, Braden said.
Mindport's IBS billing system can centralize information on one database. That could help operators reduce the number of customer service representatives necessary to handle separate video, voice and data businesses, Braden said. The database also could allow subscribers to take more responsibility for service levels changes, reducing cable system labor costs.
The company, which counts Canal +, BskyB, Multichoice Africa, Galaxy, Optus and some of DirecTV's international operations as its clients, hopes to announce a set-top deal at the show.
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